Picture this. It’s near midnight. I’m on the couch nearing the end of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road about a post apocalyptic world then I hear our garage door open outside. My heart stops. For a few seconds I hold my breath and listen for more noise. I get up suddenly but stand there not […]
Pretending Like it’s 1942
Over the last few days I’ve been pretending it’s 1942 in Melbourne. It was a weird time back then. Singapore and Phillipines had fallen to the Japanese and there was a general sense of impending doom. The prime minister of the time, Curtin, inspired Australians to serve and that was the time, the war came […]
A Visit to Prahran Mechanics Institute Library & Toying with a Storyline Idea….
Yesterday was a warm humid day in Melbourne and I had planned to play golf in the morning. However, I decided to change it at the last minute and instead, figure out something else to do with my time. I got online and started searching on YouTube and stumbled upon this little-known fact that the […]
AI Prompts for Inspiration 😒
Is this a thing now? Selling prompts for ChatGPT? Spare me. 😒 There has to be something bizarre when people spend more time refining their questions and asking a machine that trawls through all the sites online some genuine, some not and full of crap…and then pull them together and make them into more products […]
Floodwatch Warnings..Again
We are expected to have 2 months of rainfall in the next day…up to 200 mm. We have had so much rain these last few months that it’s crazy. Most of Queensland is under water too. Floods this year have devastated entire towns. With the recent earthquake, it’s created a crack in our roof and […]
Fake Eyelashes Everywhere
What’s this trend seeing young women everywhere wearing fake eyelashes? Yesterday, I dropped my car for a service and both attendants who were at the desk (one was under training), had the longest eyelashes and her eyes were hidden underneath them. With the longest painted nails that looked like talons, she tapped out my details […]
Ancient Greek Pebble Games
As is my usual custom every year, I started on a health kick. We have a wedding to attend in March so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to lose a few kilos. I’m not going overboard. Simply mindful eating, more whole foods and proteins, less sugar and refined foods, lots of rest […]
How to Lose a Library – Public Books
How ironic that the most quaintly analog form of research possible, using physical books in a physical library, has been devastated by the hijacking of a digital system. — Read on www.publicbooks.org/how-to-lose-a-library/ “Certainly in the context of the United States right now, public libraries are hot potatoes of the culture wars, and public librarians the […]
My Year in Books
2023 was a great year for reading. I read War and Peace as my “Big Book for 2023” and I LOVED IT. I was a bit sad when I finished it because it had been part of my life for a few months. I discovered Anita Brookner and read six of her novels. I fell […]
Happy New Year
Goodbye 2023 and hello 2024. I can’t believe how quickly the years go by now. I stopped work in October 2022 and decided not to return to the corporate world of learning and development or social and virtual technologies ever again. That ship has sailed and in some way, when I think about my past […]
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Here’s my latest book review that was just published on YouTube. I think this book is one of the best books I’ve read this year.
Lake Tuggeranong
A morning walk around this man-made lake in Canberra that was built in 1987 to trap sediment for the Murrumbidgee River, is a picturesque start to any day. All along the east coast of Australia, there has been a lot of rain. Torrential rain resulting in flooding and entire towns cut off. I’ve never heard […]
The Day Before Christmas
The day before Christmas and I’m spending it outside again lapping every bit of sunshine. I thought I’d enjoy the sunny day because as of tomorrow on Christmas Day, there’ll be torrential rain and hail again all week. The only negative out here are the mosquitos. That explains the can of Aeroguard on the table…. […]
The Only Story By Julian Barnes (A Book Review)
Here’s my latest book review. This year, I’ve read 75 books so far with my favourite author finds are Julian Barnes, Anita Brookner, Mieko Kawakami and Yoko Ogawa.
109th Women’s Annual Golf Trophy Presentation & Christmas Lunch
Today was our golf club’s 109th Women’s Annual Trophy Presentation and Christmas Lunch. I was looking forward to this event. We were in teams of three and had a shot gun start at 9am for 9 holes. We all got dressed up in our Christmas costumes as there was a prize for the best dressed […]
Gigantic Mushrooms
2023 was a year for the mushrooms. For one, some woman in some regional town outside of Melbourne tried to murder her family by inviting them to lunch and offering them a mushroom salad. Unfortunately a few died from the meal served but it turned out that it wasn’t the first time she had tried […]
Are These Types of Books Hot or Not?
Last week I created this fun video to talk about whether certain genres of books listed alphabetically, were hot or not, according to me. I was inspired by Renee from The Left Handed Book Reader on YouTube but I didn’t tag anyone else to respond (it just feels plain awkward and wrong like some kind […]
What To Do More Of….
This paragraph from Charlotte Wood’s new book Stone Yard Devotional. I’ve been a fan of her writing ever since I read The Weekend but this time her book is a little bit different about a middle aged woman who goes to an abbey in the Monaro Plains (outside of Canberra) to escape her life and […]
Crazy Weather, Crazy People
I have never been through weather as turbulent as we are experiencing in Melbourne. While the rest of Australia is burning up with the hottest temperatures on record creating bush fires that rage for days, our city has been battered with constant torrential rain, storms and floods. The humidity is 96%. This is unheard and […]
Champagne & A Little Bit of Bûche de Noël
So it seems my little virtual jaunt through Rimes recently to explore the champagne houses, vineyards and underground caves stocked with champagne came in handy. While YouTube can only go so far in firing up my imagination, there comes a time when you simply need to “do it for real”. So it wasn’t exactly a […]